How Should We Talk about Religion?: Perspectives, Contexts, Particularities

In this wide-ranging and timely volume, fourteen scholars address the important question, How should we talk about religion, whether our own or the religion of others? They confront such fundamental topics as the sufficiency of "reason" for a full life; the adequacy of our methods of describing and analyzing religion; the degree to which any serious confrontation with the religious experiences of others will challenge our own; and whether there can be a pluralism that does not dissolve into universal relativism.

Writing from a diversity of perspectives and academic disciplines--philosophy, classics, medieval studies, history, anthropology, economics, political science, and art history, among others--the contributors illuminate issues at the heart of the most significant cultural, social, and political debates of our day.

What emerges is not a univocal answer to the question posed in the title. Instead, by demonstrating how religion is talked about in the languages of very different academic disciplines, the essayists creatively address issues that no one should ignore: fundamentalism; the role of religion in American democracy; the tension between secular liberalism and religious rhetoric; monotheism versus pluralism; and the relationship between poverty and liberation theology. Collectively, their various approaches to talking about religion--differences due to background, age, nationality, religious outlook, and intellectual commitment, yet all valid--provide a general response to the question in the book's title: in intellectual and personal community.

Contributorss: Luis E. Bacigalupo, Clifford Ando, Sabine MacCormack, R. Scott Appleby, Bilinda Straight, Patrick J. Deneen, Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005), Eugene Garver, Javier Igu iz Echeverr a, Ruth Abbey, Sol Serrano, Carol Bier, Jeffrey Kripal, Ebrahim Moosa.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0268044074
• ISBN13: 9780268044077
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A welcome contribution to religious studies reference shelves

How Should We Talk about Religion? is an anthology of essays by fourteen esteemed scholars concerning the fundamental question: how should we talk about religion, whether regarding our own religion or the faiths of others? Taking its genesis from a year 2000 seminar that examined that very question, How Should We Talk about Religion is written in the languages of a variety of academic disciplines, the essays explore the Christian experience in Spanish America, the intersection between religion and philosophy, the definition of "fundamentalism" in religious discourse, monotheism versus pluralism, a look at the meaning of geometry in Islamic art, and much more. A welcome contribution to religious studies reference shelves, due to its meticulous cross-examination of how to properly frame debates of the most profound magnitude.